Students turn grief into startup after terror attack

BERKELEY, California — College student Anjali Banerjee was watching fireworks during a 2016 celebration on a seafront promenade in the French city of Nice when a man plowed a huge truck through the crowd, killing 86 people and wounding 200.

The University of California, Berkeley incoming senior ran through mobs of people to escape the chaos and later joined classmates to search hospitals and plaster the city with flyers of fellow students reported missing in the July 2016 terrorist attack.

She later learned three students were injured, and UC Berkeley junior Nicolas Leslie, 20, was among the dead.

Banerjee and several classmates have since turned their grief into a startup called Archer that builds digital tools to help journalists, investigators and human rights workers tackle terrorism, sanctions evasion, corruption and other global violence.

“In that moment, it was hard finding the correct information. It was hard even going to different police stations. It was chaos,” said Banerjee, who is from London.

Collaborating with each other and with the people of Nice made the students realize they could create a space in the digital world to help others do the same in the fight against terrorism, Banerjee said.

The students built a free online platform that makes big data analysis and visualization easy to access and that helps track people and companies that have been sanctioned by the United States for crimes that include monhappened Anjali Banerjee, ey laundering, and terrorism.

Banerjee, a history major, had considered a career in foreign affairs but after what corruption in France, she wanted to take immediate action. Weeks before the attack, her friend Tarishi Jain, a UC Berkeley sophomore, was among 20 hostages killed at a restaurant by militants in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

“A lot of people all over the world exist in this kind of situation on a daily basis, and we thought it was time somebody suggested another way we could combat it,” Banerjee said.

Experiencing the France attack also pushed Tyler Heintz, a 20-year-old computer science major, to change his professional goals.

What motivates Heintz and “a lot of us, is the idea that we can build products to help magnify the work of people trying to bring terrorists to justice,” he said.

In that moment, it was hard finding the correct information. It was hard even going to different police stations. It was chaos.” College student